To Kill a Potter
by Beatrice Rain
Summary: Voldemort needs Harry Potter dead. In a scheme to stop him ever being born, Voldemort forces 16 year old Edie Moore back in time to 1976 in order to kill young James and Lily. With her mother's life at stake, Edie will do anything to save her, but the intriguing Sirius Black makes it hard for her to stay emotionally detached. Can she actually kill a person or is there another way?


This was most definitely not how I wanted to die. I was meant to grow old, have a bunch of kids and live in some badass mansion, but now I was going to die before I had a chance to do any of that. So, as a particularly foul-looking Snatcher dragged me and my mother into Malfoy Manor, my life literally flashed before my eyes. Except they weren't the flashes of my life so far, they were flashes of what could have been if this jerk of a Snatcher hadn't come along and disturbed my peace.

We were dragged into the main room and I'm sure that, if I hadn't been gagged, I would have screamed like hell at the sight before me. About a dozen Goblin corpses littered the floor and the Dark Lord himself was walking barefoot through the spreading pools of crimson. And- trust me- he didn't look like a happy bunny. The snatcher immediately dropped to his knees, taking me with him and muttering pathetic apologies.

"I-I'm sorry, my lord. I didn't know you'd be here," he blurted out. The Dark Lord seethed and drew his wand.

"Avada Kedavra!" he shouted, flicking his wand towards the Snatcher who was still on his knees with his head bowed. I started to shake violently as the man beside me was knocked backwards with a flash of green light before becoming unnaturally still. I turned to my mother who had apparently thrown up next to a swelling puddle of blood.

"What's your name and blood status?" growled a woman with messy, black hair after not-so-delicately yanking away my gag.

"Edie Moore," I stated hastily, surprised that my voice still worked. "Half-blood."

The woman- who I now recognised as Bellatrix Lestrange- dragged me to my feet. "If you were a half-blood, why would you be skulking around the woods with this pathetic excuse of a witch instead of being at school?" she sneered. I said nothing, not being able to come up with a plausible explanation. I _was_ in fact a half-blood because of my pure-blood father. It was my mother who was the muggle-born and my dad had given up his life so she could escape registering. I couldn't just go to school and leave my mother alone so I went on the run with her.

"I guess your silence tells us all we need to know, _mudblood,_" grinned Bellatrix as she brought her wand to my throat.

"Enough." He'd said it so quietly that I thought I'd misheard, but Bellatrix instantly let me go as Voldemort walked towards us.

"You did a pitiful job of protecting the cup, Bellatrix. Now the Potter boy is well on his way to finding all my Horcruxes." Bellatrix bowed low in a bout of pathetic grovelling. "He needs to die and he needs to die now."

"But we don't know where he is, my Lord," muttered Bellatrix from the floor.

"I KNOW THAT!" screamed Voldemort, causing Bellatrix to cower even more. "But," he continued, "maybe our little mudblood friend here can help us." I swear my heart stopped there and then. Bellatrix just looked confused.

"Wouldn't it be so much easier if you could destroy a forest before its seeds had been sewn?" Voldemort's somewhat rhetorical question was met by a number of blank stares. His smirk showed that he relished the fact that no-one else had managed to catch on to his line of thinking. "Miss Moore, you seem like a bright girl. Would you care to enlighten us?" I stayed silent, causing Voldemort to point his wand menacingly at me mother. Damn, this dude liked to be in control.

"You want to kill Harry Potter's parents before he was born." I whispered. "But time magic is extremely unstable. What you want to do is impossible; a time turner can take you no more than five hours into the past."

Voldemort literally roared in anger and I cursed my big mouth as I stared into my mother's terrified eyes. I tried with all my will to somehow communicate to her in that one glance that everything was going to be alright, but she remained looking like a deer in the headlights.

"I AM THE MOST POWERFUL WIZARD TO EVER EXIST ON THIS EARTH!" roared Voldemort. "Time cannot kill me nor will it hinder me. I have the power to send you back in time."

"M-Me?" I stuttered, well and truly gobsmacked.

"James and Lily Potter will be more vulnerable as young students. I can hardly walk into Hogwarts. You'd draw less suspicion as just another student."

"But what's to stop me from not killing anybody and finding some rock to live under." I countered. Voldemort actually laughed out loud at that. It was a gut-wrenching and cruel laugh that sent a thousand shivers down my spine.

"Clever girl!" he said. "You'd remove yourself from the equation in order to avoid changing history. But if- once you have left- events have not changed, if Harry Potter is alive and I still stand in this room, I will kill your mother." He was still smiling as he said it.

"If there was no Harry Potter and you won the war, my mother would likely be dead anyway." I spat, desperate to somehow get out of this.

"That's right," he said, my heart dropping at his remaining confidence. "If you don't do as I ask, your mother will most definitely die, but if you do kill James and Lily Potter there is a chance, no matter how small, that your mother will survive. You cannot ignore that possibility."

My face crinkled in distress. He'd won and he knew it. I couldn't doom my mother to death when I knew there was a chance, albeit a small one, that she could live.

"How old are you?" questioned Voldemort.

"Sixteen."

"Sixth year?" he asked and I nodded. "1976 it is, then. I trust you will not fail me." he raised his wand and I cried out to my mother as she reached towards me. Then she was gone, along with everything else around me, in a flash of light.

Instead of the walls of Malfoy Manor, I was surrounded by black, black water which filled my lungs as I gasped in shock. It faintly dawned on me that I was drowning. I'd been here two seconds and I had already failed. All I could think as the world went as black as the water was that my mother was going to die. I had as good as killed her.

* * *

"Bloody hell, James. When you said someone was _in_ the lake, I thought you were mad!" The voice was distant at first, but with each passing moment it became clearer and I realised that I wasn't dead at all. I felt an open mouth against mine as someone tried to push air into my lungs. Jolting upright, I spluttered a torrent of water onto the grass next to me before lying back down and closing my eyes. My chest rose harshly with each intake of breath. Then, for some reason the mouth was on mine again.

"Sirius!" exclaimed another male voice, "she's alive already!" I felt the unfamiliar weight being pushed off me and opened my eyes to see a boy around my age with shaggy, wet, black hair and a lop-sided smile that told me he was mighty pleased with himself. Turning to the other boy, I was well and truly baffled to see Harry Potter staring down at me.

"You alright?" he asked with concern. After a minute of staring at each other in an incredibly awkward silence, it dawned on me that this wasn't Harry Potter at all. His face was longer and his hair messier than the boy's who was in the year above me at school. The other boy had called him James... Damn. I was rescued by the guy I was going to kill. Damn. I bolted up and pushed him away from me with enough force to land him on his backside.

"Hey!" called the other boy before grabbing me by the shoulder. Before I knew what I was doing, I'd punched the poor fella in the face and aimed a powerful kick where the sun don't shine. Hey, it was just a reflex! James Potter stared at me in shock as his friend rolled around on the ground, deciding whether to cradle his face or his, erm... swimsuit area. Not knowing what to do, I jumped up and ran in the direction of the castle.

"Sorry!" I called over my shoulder as I sprinted away. Wonderful start Edie.


End file.
